Obedience and Disobedience...That is the Question...

I was talking to Terry the other evening about this and that, and our conversation drifted over to scripture, and as we began to talk about the New and Old Testaments, I finally realized why the New Testament is so much more difficult to teach children than the Old Testament, I mean duh!

If you think about it, the OT is the child of the NT. It's the foundation for the basic tenets of how to honor and obey God. Every story in the OT is about obedience and disobedience. It's about heroes and those who failed and about how each hero mastered his life and the quest at hand and became a figure to admire and revere thousands of years later.

If you think of the OT as the years during childhood, you see the story of Adam and Eve establishing obedience for the first time, just like the slap on the paw we give to just toddling children. No! No! is established. As we move to the story of Noah, we learn that through disobedience, all is lost, and by obedience all is saved along with our family and friends. This helps to draw our family closer in the eyes of the child, and the fact that the family pets are involved is also a good lesson on responsibility toward creatures less that we are.

As we move to the Abraham story, we are reminded that trust in God is essential. The Moses story is about friendship with God, and how we are able to have that if we work hard enough at the obedience ideal. It's about responsibility toward others and how we are here to learn and then to guide others towards goodness.

David's story is one of championing his people, defender of the faith, defender of good...and he is rewarded as perhaps God's favorite.

Job is a story of friendship as well. It's Job's story of unbreakable love for God no matter what the Devil does. We are growing up!

As Scripture is read, the child of the OT grows into the man or woman and is ready for the next step...the New Testament and the adult world.

We are established now, and can listen to the message of Christianity with more complex issues and more a more complex agenda. "Why" is not a question for children under six because they don't have the cognitive skills to answer. So we deal in lots of "whats." The OT has a great supply of "whats" and a lifetime of answers like "because it's good." Obedience...

We know how to establish ourselves with God from the OT, and when we move over to the NT, it's time to establish ourselves with others. We learn how to treat others, how to behave ourselves with others, and how to live peacefully in the world of those who are not so inclined to have a relationship with God.

We glean what is important, what is necessary and we go about doing in a righteous frame of mind.

So where do children fit in? Since children are establishing themselves in the world, the OT is a wonderful teaching tool that helps them grow into adulthood with a balanced sense for the achievement of good and the disdain for evil. They need to hear these stories as a foundation to righteous living because without the collective bond of a people determined towards good rather than evil is a world that's too dangerous for anyone. Fairy tales do the same thing, but without God. If God is important to parents, they will use the OT to establish a guide to life choices rather than fairy tales because fairy tales aren't true and Scripture is.

Teaching the NT to children is done much like teaching the OT, it's a story...listen and hear, and then, when the mind of the child develops, he can understand what he is supposed to understand. It's a long process, a lifetime of thinking and being trained to think and doing and falling and doing and rising and doing whats and knowing why.